Is my animation supposed to render frame by frame?
An animation is perhaps best rendered frame by frame to seperate image files and then consolidated to a video file.

Heres why:  If your video fails to complete you lose it all. You still have the blender scene. In a long animation if it fails at say frame 64, you cn simply start it again and you will have all the individual frames to combine. 

You can also farm the job out to a render farm , but there are issues there as well.

When I did the Dissolve tutorial (if thats what you did ) I think it took just over 1 minute per frame. Mine was 960 x 540 

my PC - an intel celeron J1900 1.9 quad processor. Blender does not recognise a GPU (video card)